Derisive diatribes about the state of the nation, nation states and swerving leftward

4 May 2004

The dire need for more training???

Today, I listened to the talking heads discuss the recent prisoner abuse cases in Iraq. Evidently, the problem was a "lack of training." The soldiers and corporate employees in charge evidently were not informed that forcing prisoners to simulate sodomy was not appropriate. The British troups evidently were never told that beating a prisoner to death for no reason was not the gentlemanly thing to do. So now the pentagon will find out what went wrong and discipline the naughty individuals involved, providing a few hours of training for future guards. The guards will be given instruction on Arab cultural norms (an interesting idea, since the guards originally designed their methods of torture to intentionally antagonize victims through the violation of these norms).

Who knows? Perhaps this whole war could have been prevented had the US simply "provided training" to the evil Iraqi regime that was guilty of so much torture and abuse of its civilian population. Perhaps Sudam Hussein and others who were supported by the US CIA simply lacked training and information on "correct procedures." When US firms shipped Iraq materials for biological weapons, perhaps they simply forgot to include a little slip of paper providing instructions ("Not to be used on civilian populations.") Or when the US provided Iraq with weaponry, perhaps they forgot to inform them that the weapons were not to be used in the ongoing unprovoked attack against Iran. At any rate, the problems so far surely are not due to racism or evil. It's clearly simply a matter of information. I'm sure if we give the organizations (the US army and CIA) even more money, they will solve these problems by providing a class or two on proper American behavior.